Some of my fondest memories from growing up in rural York County are the evenings spent swapping stories and snapping beans on the screened-in porch. I vividly recall the barefoot walks to the pond where we fished and the garden where we grew and picked our own vegetables.
Back then, our nearest neighbors in the Bethel community were aunts and uncles. No one bothered to lock their front door. When the local fire department ran short on funds, the community always came up with the money through a cake walk or hot dog fundraiser.
I’m still proud of the time I guessed the closest to the number of lima beans in a fruit jar at the Halloween carnival, a feat that earned me a whopping $10.
Times were different then. As I read the cover story of this month’s magazine, I was impressed at the efforts of Hilton Head Island native Thomas Barnwell to preserve what remains of the community he grew up in.
His story inspired me to reassess the transformation of my hometown over the years. When I was a boy, there was just one fifth-grade class in Clover School District 2. Now, there are 17. Apartment complexes have sprung up to accommodate thousands of Charlotte commuters. They’re building a Harris Teeter grocery store down the road from my parents’ house. It's much harder to recognize Bethel now. They even changed my community’s name. It now goes by Lake Wylie.
Age and experience have taught me that change is inevitable, both good and bad. All we can do is decide whether to adapt to the times or get steamrolled by them.
I reflected on this while talking recently with Carolyn Grant, a Palmetto Electric Cooperative trustee and Gullah descendent who grew up around the same time I did in the ’60s and remembers walking several miles to church on Hilton Head Island.
She described how her father, born and raised in a shrimping and farming family, recognized that the construction of the bridge to Hilton Head Island in 1956 would rapidly develop his community into a prime tourist destination.
He chose to adapt to the times, opening a series of businesses to make the best of what was coming. His grocery store, sandwich shop, motel and other businesses became staples of the island for beachgoers and construction workers alike.
Ms. Grant and Mr. Barnwell co-authored a book that shares the history of the island’s people and culture: Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge. Even amid Hilton Head’s explosive growth, Grant, Barnwell and others have worked to preserve and celebrate the island’s Gullah roots and historical significance as the site of America’s first self-governing community of formerly enslaved people. If you drive up and down the island today, you’ll pass restaurants, resorts and beaches, but you’ll also see signage and sites that point to a history worth remembering.
I admire the way Grant’s father and others on the island chose to preserve the past while embracing the future.
South Carolina’s electric cooperatives face a similar challenge. They serve about 70% of the Palmetto State’s land mass, including remote communities from the Blue Ridge mountains to the Lowcountry. Many of these tiny towns are like Bethel, facing rapid population growth and game-changing economic development.
Much of that growth is because the rest of the country has finally realized what we knew all along — that South Carolina is a wonderful place to grow up, work, start a family and retire.
It’s up to each of us to manage that inevitable growth in ways that preserve what made our communities and our state so great in the first place.